The macOS operating system — née Mac OS X — turned 20 years old on March 24th. Former Apple VP Scott Forstall used his Twitter account to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X and remembers when Steve Jobs decided on the name for the 10th version of Apple’s operating system.
“I still remember when we named you. In a small room in IL1. When Steve slashed a large X on the wall and smiled. Look at how far you’ve come from a young Cheetah,” said Forstall. The system was named Mac OS at that time, but Apple had been working on a completely new version that came to be Mac OS X.
Long-time Mac users may remember that the first versions of Mac OS X were named after big cats, but that was only because Apple used “Cheetah” as the codename for Mac OS X 10.0. After that, the company decided to use the big cat names for other versions of OS X, such as Puma, Tiger, and Leopard.
Forstall left Apple in 2012 after the Apple Maps controversy in which the company replaced Google Maps with its own map solution, which was deemed unfinished and buggy. He was mainly replaced by Craig Federighi, who leads Apple’s software engineering to this day.
MacDailyNews Take: Forstall’s tweet:
Happy 20th Birthday Mac OS X! I still remember when we named you. In a small room in IL1. When Steve slashed a large X on the wall and smiled. Look at how far you’ve come from a young Cheetah.
— Scott Forstall (@forstall) March 24, 2021